Nature’s Bounty

Y THE TIME of his death in 1946, the art of Joseph Stella lived in the company of misconception and oblivion. An artist nurtured by a relentless desire for transformation and a longing for classical beauty, Stella was incorporated into the American painting tradition as a preeminent “American Futurist,” the painter of the Brooklyn Bridge, while the pictures of his mature years, unabashedly theatrical and symbolist, had been relegated to a mistake of history. Only with a 1994 monographic exhibitionernist by Barbara Haskell at the Whitney some aspects of his later practice came into a new focus. And now a new show, “Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature”, opening